Can You Hear Me (Yet)?—Rhetorical Horses, Trans-species Communication, and Interpersonal Attunement

Abstract

Despite ongoing interdisciplinary calls to level the playing field toward a more symmetrical view of human-nonhuman animal relationships, frameworks and formats that serve to border human and animal lifeworlds into separate categories of experience and study continue to stymie such efforts. This interdisciplinary focuses on several aspects of language and communication concerning horse-human interactions. These include the limits and possibilities of the theory and methods through which scholars frame and describe such communication, and the means by which horses attempt to communicate rhetorically with humans. I review recent applied ethology studies concerning equine communicative abilities, and relationships. Then, using models and theory from the fields of communication studies and psychology, I consider the implications of these findings for interspecies power dynamics, specifically in instances where humans do not allow for the types of communication and levels of interpersonal attunement of which horses are capable. Pulling from interdisciplinary theory and method, this case study introduces a model for “trans-species communication” that provides a means for studying and speaking about human-equine relationships.

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